New technology and tighter deadlines have made it common-place for critical new requirements to be misunderstood or omitted, and for errors to be introduced in the drilling control systems’ design and development processes. When these errors are not discovered until the Acceptance, Commissioning or Operation phases, the resulting problems can cause project delays, expensive NPT, and health, safety and environmental (HSE) incidents. Catching errors and omissions during the Design phase is more time and cost-effective by a factor of 10+.

As an independent third-party, Athens Group provides a practical auditing process to improve the overall quality of the design and development phases. We reduce costs and risk by helping to ensure that requirements and design truly reflect your functional, performance and reliability requirements. In order to minimize misunderstandings, omissions, and errors and to enable more comprehensive acceptance testing at FAT and delivery, an Athens Group Drilling Technology Assurance Consultant:

  • Tracks down and reviews all pertinent project documentation including vendor functional and interface design specifications, end user manuals, maintenance and support manuals specific to your project, and vendor software development processes related to the requirements and design phases
  • Interviews vendor and company operational experts to help fill requirements
  • Ensures that all requirements are addressed in the design documents
  • Compiles a comprehensive, organized list of control requirements for all equipment in scope
  • Manages review and approval cycles for all applicable documents
  • Scores all requirements-related risk and provides access to that data via our Real-Time Risk Assessment Scorecard

How We're Different

  1. Our deep understanding of software best-practices and our experience with control systems from all of the leading vendors enable us to deliver this service more cost-effectively than any other vendor.
  2. Athens Group’s Requirements Validation and Design Verification Proven Practices combine the best cross-industry guidance and international standards in this area with our proprietary, comprehensive DTA Requirements Issue Tracking Database. This database allows us to ensure that each of your requirements is accurately reflected in the design document, and that it can be, and is, thoroughly tested in each phase of the rig lifecycle, including Factory Acceptance Testing, Commissioning, Systems Integration Testing, and Acceptance.
  3. We have documented our experience over the years with many common equipment combinations and integration points. This knowledge base is available to all of our consultants, enabling them to more accurately identify potential requirements and design failures and recommend effective mitigations.

Failure Point Example *

A project was fairly well advanced when it became apparent that the vendor-recommended method for pulling the casing strings would have, in fact, stripped the threads. After some discussions, the project team figured out a slow, complex workaround. Comprehensive requirements validation and design verification would have identified this issue during technical documentation review and ensured that the problem was resolved before construction began.

* All Failure Points are issues we have identified on multiple rigs on which we have worked